Hope Against Hope. Out of the Woods
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organizations—or, a descent into war. The ecological crisis, while supposedly undifferentiated in its effects on humanity, is overdetermined in its causes.
As antiauthoritarian communists and anarchists, we oppose these articulations of environmentalism. However, we also find similar reasons to oppose many of the conventional leftist responses to the ecological crisis. Green anarchism, for example, has too often been focused on defending localized purity of autonomous zones, which in our view constitutes a dangerously introverted response to a globally differentiated disaster. In its romantic attempts to find a pure nature to defend or return to, green anarchism has orchestrated another set of violences.29 At times, an essentialist conception of nature has been expanded into gender, with some (most infamously Deep Green Resistance) articulating transphobic views. Other anarchists—especially in North America—have used primitivism as an excuse to imitate and appropriate Indigeneity. Shockingly, criticisms of such projects have been labelled as sectarian slurs and intra-anarchist scuffles, rather than substantive disagreements. Unlike the well-circulated 2009 anonymous anarchist text Desert or the reactionary Dark Mountain Project, we are uninterested in a project of “nature-loving anarchism,” nor do we countenance such works’ trendy poetic nihilism disguised as sober realism. “Nature” today emphasizes only a separate and fallen world. It is no real shock that nostalgia for a now-spoilt nature is a frequent theme in reactionary thought, the “romantic anticapitalism” that Iyko Day properly names.30 Such a racial project, she argues, is premised on both the appropriation of Indigenous lands and practices by settlers and the exclusion of those deemed corrupted by capital—Asians, Jews, and migrants more generally. Against romantic anticapitalism, then, we draw inspiration from Black, Indigenous, and anti-border anarchists and communists, for whom romantic anticapitalism can only reek of white supremacy.31
This book reflects our desire to write something useful, to create something that makes it easier to understand the total interdependence of the extractions, exploitations, enslavements, and extirpations that colonial capital has brought upon this world. The brutal techniques of these myriad forms of ruination are too often reproduced in green aesthetics, politics, and practices. The logics of reactionary ecology, border imperialism, and racialized state violence are perpetuated and proliferated in environmentalism. Such a situation demands a different and differentiated response. We see such a response in inchoate tendencies all around us. This book is about the countless ways people survive amidst and against the ruins. We believe these shared strategies to survive ecological crises make a collective thriving within and beyond ruination possible. Thus, in the service of something that truly changes everything—which is to say planetary revolutions—we offer new concepts to hold together, and hold close, amidst the continuation of the crisis. Against gleeful doomsaying, romantic anticapitalism, and hopeful technofixes:
We hope-against-hope
for a careful, yet fierce, queer cyborg ecology
built through a bricolage of tools, techniques, and knowledges already around us
to move within, against, and beyond the ecological crisis
for survival pending revolution
to make, altogether, disaster communism.
GUIDE TO THE BOOK
Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis is organized into four sections: BORDERS, NATURES, FUTURES, and STRATEGIES. Each section is preceded by an introduction that contextualizes the essays in our thought and in the world. We highly recommend reading these introductory pieces, all written in 2019, before the essays contained within. We have updated these essays for internal consistency across the book, albeit admittedly some essays are very much products of the moment in which they emerged. We have, through further citations and introductory remarks, revised the shortcomings of our earlier thoughts. We hope the contradictions that remain can be fruitful for readers. In particular, we continue to work through the contradiction between an understanding of ecological crisis as something that reproduces and is reproduced by other social crises and a more expanded notion of ecological crisis as something that incorporates these crises (though does not eradicate their specificities). Although we have discussed this tension amongst ourselves, no clear consensus has yet to emerge (and this is as true for some of us as individuals as much as for the collective as a whole).
We begin with BORDERS, the struggles against nationalism, enclosure, and immobility as imperial projects of nation-states. We suggest that these features of our world play a key role in reproducing ecological crisis; and that the latter must not be understood as separate from those punitive regimes seeking to manage human mobility. The interview and four essays in this section forcefully argue for a politics beyond and against the border imperialism of nation-states.
The essays in NATURES unpack how understandings of what and where “nature” is affect: the ability of capital to appropriate and extract value. Nature is never as self-evident as it is made to seem; in fact, there is nothing less “natural” than nature. We demonstrate this claim through an evaluation of the role the defense of nature has played for reactionary and fascist individuals and political movements. We further show how the understanding that nature is always produced can liberate us to collectively construct better worlds.
Perhaps nothing is made more visible by climate disaster than the manner in which the future is very much at stake in the choices we make today. FUTURES contains three essays concerning what this means for climate and left politics. In mainstream environmentalism the future is too often a safe, knowable realm for heterosexual white children to inherit. By thinking through a range of struggles, we reposition the future as an unknowable site of possibility for a variety of subjects in constant formation.
There are many proposals for what is to be done in the face of disaster. STRATEGIES outlines our analysis of contemporary leftist approaches to the ecological crisis, especially those which under the name of climate justice somehow seek to obviate or even exclude struggles against capital, coloniality, and racism. But we refuse to remain only negative. In our most recent and comprehensive essay, we outline the ways disaster communism might be understood to be already emergent amidst such environmental crisis.
Much more could be said about these essays and their possible strengths and weaknesses. We remain self-critical, but this book presents an opportunity to expand the scope of critique. As disaster engulfs spaces and times around us, let us put to you a simple question: what will it take to get out of the woods, together?
1. Stephen Leahy, “Climate Change Impacts Worse than Expected, Global Report Warns,” National Geographic, October 7, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/10/ipcc-report-climate-change-impacts-forests-emissions/.
2. Kelly Levin, “8 Things You Need to Know About the IPCC 1.5˚C Report,” World Resources Institute, October 7, 2018, https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/10/8-things-you-need-know-about-ipcc-15-c-report.
3. Quoted in Andrew Freedman, “Climate Scientists Refute 12-Year Deadline to Curb Global Warming,” Axios, January 22, 2019, https://www.axios.com/climate-change-scientists-comment-ocasio-cortez-12-year-deadline-c4ba1f99-bc76-42ac-8b93-e4eaa926938d.html.
4. Stabroek News, “Fighting Complacency towards Climate Change,” Stabroek News (blog), October 20, 2018, https://www.stabroeknews.com/2018/opinion/editorial/10/20/fighting-complacency-towards-climate-change/.
5. Mary Annaïse Heglar, “When Climate Change Broke My Heart and Forced Me to